James Rocchi Biography

Looking at the mammoth 'Bond 50' set, it's a little startling to realize how compact a package it is considering it's full of all the films making up one of the more enduring characters and series in the pop-culture canon. The 22 films, starting with 1962's 'Dr. No' and ending with 2008's 'Quantum of Solace,' and even with a blank space for 'Skyfall' when it comes to disc in 2013 -- a nice bit of long-term thinking that demonstrates that for Hollywood, for 50 years, selling Bond has been like buying bonds -- is a solid investment, but better when you keep an eye on them.

by James Rocchi September 27, 2012 @ 10:45 AM
Sony Pictures/New Line Cinema

And that's the problem with time travel, or at least part of the fun, which is that where you enter into the story may not be where the people in the story are coming into and out, like we discussed earlier. In 'Looper,' time travel works the same as a one-way bus ride to Muncie, if Muncie were 30 years before in the time-and-space continuum and the bus broke every rule of physics as we know it. In 'Primer,' the time machine works in a similar fashion -- never putting you forward, exactly, but rather putting you back so that you can move forward from that back and do everything over again, but different, and since only you have any knowledge of what really happened before, why not change it?

For myself, and for many fellow ink-stained wretches who cover, with joy, the world of film, September is the cruelest, craziest month. There's the Toronto International Film Festival and then -- less than a week after that meghilla of too many awesome movies and too many awesome Canadians is over -- there's Austin's Fantastic Fest, famously called "a film festival with the boring parts left out," replete with beheadings and behandings and bemusements. Plus, it's the informal start of Oscar season, which warms movieland up pretty fiercely even if you don't care about who exactly the Academy extends, with shaking hands, its awards to. And the biggest funny thing I can imagine is that I'm in the middle of all that and, of course, thinking of the one person, and one film, that combines the arty aspirations of the Oscar race, the Canadian-ness of Tiff's programming and the scares and shrieks of Fantastic Fest, and that's 2004's remake of 'Dawn of the Dead.'

New on DVD, Blu-ray and streaming this week, there's the long-awaited Blu-ray set of a beloved saga, a scary-funny head-twister, Tim Burton's best film and a modern classic comes to the Criterion Collection. ...

by James Rocchi August 30, 2012 @ 11:10 AM
The Weinstein Co./20th Century Fox

It's a little sad when you're let down by a film -- anyone who loves movies can certainly laugh at a bad film with the best of them -- but I think the real secret key to the movie lover's club's most secret hallows would be how you want every movie to be good. Or even amazing.
Take, for example, this week's 'Lawless,' a Prohibition-era drama about the Bondurant boys, backwoods bootleggers who refused to play along with a more hypocritical and corrupt form of the previous hypocritical corruption that had been earning them a fortune up to now.